I know that the most wonderful time of the year is officially over as soon I get that note from our Budget and Finance Director saying that it’s now a less wonderful time of year when we ask the Regional Income Tax Authority (RITA) to mail out letters to the taxpayers that we have on file who appear to have neglected to file municipal income taxes with us for 2015.

I’m sure it’s a simple oversight and the City and RITA staff work hard to help make it as easy and pain-free as possible for procrastinators to catch-up and pay their 2015 share along with the rest of us.

It turns out that in order to wrap-up the 2015 tax cycle, RITA is sending out 6, 677 letters to non-filers reminding them of the importance of following the law and filing their taxes in Kent.

There’s always a certain percentage of those cases that can be cleared up quickly with a phone call and a fax but there others that could eventually be issued a subpoena and be taken to court.

Usually the fastest way to resolve these mis-understandings is directly with RITA using the contacts listed below but if residents need additional help the Kent City Finance Department can provide guidance as well. They are located at 930 Overholt Road or can be reached by phone at 330 678-8102.

I’m pleased to report that the posting of the City’s “clean” audit on the State Auditor’s web site concludes another successful State Audit for us.

A significant amount of work is performed by our Budget and Finance staff — both during the year and during the audit — to get us this successful result.

After such a long process, it feels a bit anti-climatic but in the City finance world anti-climatic is the gold standard.

There’s no ribbon cuttings or grand openings with clean audits — it’s just a final statement from the Auditor’s Office — but frankly there’s no better news a city can have than to get external validation that we run our City business in full conformance with all laws and regulations.

Without that, all those ribbon cuttings and grand openings don’t mean too much, so I wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the Finance Director, Dave Coffee, City Comptroller, Brian Huff, and all of the staff that contribute to this annual rite of passage.

Throw some confetti up in the air as we give Budget and Finance a well deserved a city finance version of a “ticker-tape” parade.

The City of Kent has 194 full time employees — about 80% of which are in Police, Fire, Streets and Utilities.

With an organization of our size, employee turnover happens, and thanks to the City’s Civil Service Coordinator we keep our lists of candidates for civil service jobs up to date and handy.

Just last week I had paperwork come across my desk announcing the hiring of a new firefighter/paramedic, and the Police Chief mentioned that she’s still looking for a School Crossing Guard for Walls Elementary School and she’s getting ready to advertise for a vacant dispatch position.

The Fire Department has been struggling to keep full staff this summer due to a couple of long term injuries and an unexpected retirement so the new hire is great news for them (and all of us that depend on them in emergencies).

I’m trying to do my part too — I recently hired the City’s first IT Manager (Gary Bishop) and we selected a new Public Service Director who will start in Kent on August 22nd.

The IT Manager position is a long time coming — we’ve needed someone dedicated to managing and planning our IT resources for years — but after 10 years of cutting and freezing positions due to tough times financially, this position had to sit tight while we did our best with part time technical trouble shooters being on-call when we needed them — which was pretty much all of the time.

A City with the level of sophisticated computer systems that we have — from our financial systems, utility plants, and our public safety network — our IT needed full time attention.

Thankfully, with a little more flexibility in our City budget this year, Council unanimously approved the creation of the new IT Manager position.

It turns out that one of our part time tech experts was interested in the position full time, so after we conducted a competitive open search process, his inside knowledge gave him the edge he needed to convince the City’s selection team that he was the top candidate.

Gary had done this same work for years for the City of Cuyahoga Falls so he brings a great technical understanding of what makes City’s technical systems work and how to best optimize them.

The City has some first rate technical systems in place — we invested slowly but wisely over the years — but we need someone to help us integrate those systems and inter-connect them so that we can get everything out of them that they are capable of.

It’s exciting to think about what Gary should help us accomplish in the next couple of years.

As promised, we’ve had a busy summer collecting data to begin to move the City Hall 2020 Project from the “brain-storming” phase — where all ideas were encouraged and welcomed — into the “evaluation” phase — where we now begin to triage ideas and sift out the probable from improbable, and possible from the impossible.

It’s still very early in the process so this is still just a preliminary analysis where we’re trying to lump the ideas into general buckets — like more affordable or more expensive buckets, more realistic or less realistic, good use or best use buckets, etc.

With the ideas in their respective buckets we should then be able to focus on the shorter list of the more affordable, most realistic, and best use buckets first for further more detailed analysis.

The goal of this process to start with as a wide of funnel of ideas as possible but to gradually narrow in on ideas that seem to offer the best answers for: What to Build? Where To Build? and Who Should Be In It?

Answer these questions right and you’ve got a great new building worthy of being called Kent City Hall for the next 50 years.

One of the tools we used to help us slice through the ideas was a community survey.

We had a phone, online, and hard copy survey completed this summer that offered insights into what the community considers the most important elements of the project.

Those survey results help us know which buckets we need to focus on first.

Here’s some of the things we learned from the survey:

about 50% of the residents had ever visited City Hall and half of those folks visited less than once a year.

about 50% of the visits to City Hall are to pay utility and tax bills

about 25% of the visits are to attend a City Council meeting

about 50% of residents knew what City services were offered at City Hall

for a new City Hall residents rank cost as a top priority

for a new City Hall residents want as many services as possible that make sense to fit in the building

About once every 12-18 months we gather up all of the City items that are no longer in use or somehow made their way into the City’s hands (usually through criminal evidence confiscations) and we put them up for auction. That time is now for 2016.

We’ve found that on line auctions get a lot more “eyeballs” on the goods and that tends to lead to more bids and better prices, so once again we’re using an online auction service.

Here’s an example of a Honda Civic that is up for auction by the City of Kent.